On October 21, the United States signed an important agreement with Spain, Austria, France, Italy and the United Kingdom to eliminate certain taxes and tariffs, according to statement from the US Trade Representative.
The agreement comes after these countries agreed to join the global pact promoted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to set a minimum global tax of 15% on the profits of companies with annual revenues of more than 750 million euros.
Thanks to this agreement, the United States will not impose the tariffs on products from those countries that had been applied in retaliation for taxes applied in those countries on certain digital services, which some media have called the “Google tax”. The US had announced at the beginning of June the imposition of an additional tariff of 25% on certain products. This punitive tariff was created and temporarily suspended immediately, but it was to take effect in the next few days.
The agreement will allow in return that, under certain conditions, US companies subject to such taxes will be able to deduct payments made from future taxes from the OECD global tax.
This news, which confirms the positive evolution of trade relations between Europe and the US , joins the temporary suspension established in March of tariffs between the US and several European countries derived from disputes over public aid to Boeing and Airbus, which we already discussed in this article of our blog and that was extended for 5 years in June. Likewise, the news confirms the increase in multilateralism that we expected during the Biden Era according to this other article.